Mantle Officially Launched For Battlefield 4 While Catalyst 14.1 Rolls Out To The Public

AMD is finally ready to unveil the Mantle API to the public, along with new patches and drivers enabling the low-level API released today. To add more fuel on the already burning flame, AMD has finally released the Catalyst 14.1 beta drivers to the public as well, and can be downloaded from here.

At 4 AM EST, gamers were able to download a Mantle-enabled patch for Battlefield 4 through EA’s Origin service. At this stage, Battlefield 4 is the only full game that supports Mantle, although Oxide Games Mantle-enabled ‘StarSwarm’ demo is available through Steam for gamers that want to further evaluate Mantle performance on their systems. Another Mantle-enabled title, Thief, will be released in February.

AMD states that the API is “primarily designed to improve performance in scenarios where the CPU is the limiting factor”. Mantle makes “less of an impact” in GPU-bound situations, although the API does have “some built-in features to improve GPU-bound performance […] gains in these cases are largely dependent on how well Mantle features and optimizations are being utilized by the developer.”

The things to bear in mind here are, fist of all, that this is the initial release of Mantle, and AMD says the API will continue to evolve and improve in the months ahead. There’s a strong possibility AMD and their game partners will be able to squeeze more out of the API as it improves. Secondly, Mantle, like a number of AMD launches recently, is geared towards giving a better PC gaming experience to those on lower-end hardware. A performance kick for those with extremely fast CPUs and GPUs isn’t hugely important, whereas a 40% performance boost on slower hardware could be the difference between a playable and unplayable game.